An Excess of Burnses Keep a Case Open

Solving old New York crime cases can prove puzzlingly difficult when investigating persons who share a popular surname. This appears to have happened last month when a handwritten letter from a deceased Long Island woman created a stir in the news. Police dusted off "cold case files" after the woman, Stella Ferrucci-Good, who died in April at the age of 91, claimed her late husband had heard over drinks that a policeman named Charles Burns was indirectly connected to the death of mobster-turned-informant Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, who plunged from a window at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island in 1941. She also claimed that Charles Burns and his cabby brother Frank played a role in killing Judge Joseph Crater, who disappeared 75 years ago, and is supposedly buried under the Coney Island boardwalk.

The Reles and Crater cases have continued to pique interest over the years. As a labor attorney, Malcolm Goldstein, a friend of Frederic Johnson, Crater's last law secretary, said of the judge's disappearance, "It was the Hoffa case of its period."

But with "Burns" ranking 141st among the 5,000 most common and popular surnames, according to a recent U.S. census, the trouble is determining which Burns the letter refers to. The Knickerbocker has learned that an officer Burns guarded the entrance of the hotel where Reles died and another guarded the mobster-turned-informant's wife.

A police source, declining to be identified by name, told the Knickerbocker last week that mention of any names at this time is "purely speculation" and that the entire investigation is still continuing.

A September 1 article by a Newsday reporter, Rocco Parascandola, quoted police sources as saying there were three officers named Charles Burns at the time of Crater's disappearance in 1930. An examination of the 1930 census shows 27-year-old police officer Charles F. Burns living on 70th Street in Brooklyn, and 26-year-old police officer Charles Burns living on Hopkinson Avenue in Brooklyn. A detective Charles M. Byrnes worked in the 81st Precinct.

Three law enforcement officials named Burns appear in statements taken in 1951 at the office of the Brooklyn district attorney for a grand jury investigating the death of Reles, who was dubbed "the canary who could sing but couldn't fly."

A researcher named Richard Mc-Dermott of Bayside, Queens, who is working on a book called "The Combination: The Story of Murder Incorporated," provided the Knickerbocker with copies of documents from the papers of Mayor O'Dwyer at the Municipal Archives.

In 1951, Charles F. Burns lived at 1052 E. 38th Street in Brooklyn, having retired from the police force in 1946. He later worked in bookbinding. He testified that he was guarding a downstairs hotel entrance on the night of November 12, 1941, when the hotel assistant manager informed him that a body was lying on the extension roof of the hotel. He and a patrolman named Doyle were the first to reach Reles. Doyle remained on the roof, while Mr. Burns proceeded to call the stationhouse.

Another retired patrolman, Charles H. Burns, also questioned in the 1951 investigation, resided at 1658 W. 2nd Street in Brooklyn. He served on the police force between 1927 and 1947. In an examination of New York's Civil List around 1930, he resided at 2868 Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn and worked at the 61st Precinct.

For about two years leading up to Reles's death in 1941, Charles H. Burns rotated as bodyguard to Mrs. Reles and her two children, who as family members of material witnesses, were under police protection at home. He had accompanied Mrs. Reles to the Half Moon Hotel about a dozen times and even entered Abe Reles's suite with her on some occasions. But on the night of Reles's death, Charles H. Burns was on a vacation - which he interrupted to accompany Mrs. Reles to the funeral.

In 1951, Charles H. Burns bartended one night a week at Pacillio on West 17th Street and Neptune Avenue and another night at the Gay Way at Stillwell and Surf Avenues.

Also connected to the Reles case was a homicide detective named John Burns. According to the 1951 investigation, Detective Charles Celano of the 70th Squad headed over to the Half Moon with "Captain McGowan, Lieutenant Donovan, Detective Burns, [and] Detective Cush" that morning.

Here the case takes a doppelganger detour. Matthew Kennedy, 101, former director of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, told the Knickerbocker that he recalls two Burns brothers around the 1940s who were identical twins. Compare this to a note on a Web site, thecolumnists.com, in which Mary Burns maintains the innocence of her father, Charles F. Burns, and mentions another Coney Island policeman named Charles Burns "who had a brother who used to wear his brother's uniform and walk his beat when his brother didn't make it to work."

No crime was committed, according to the 1951 grand jury investigation, which concluded that Reles's death was accidental. Some say that Reles, whose room was in a hotel suite guarded by five policemen, was either trying to escape or attempting to enter the room beneath his. It is thought that he was lowering himself by knotted sheets attached to a wire that snapped under his weight. The grand jury reported that if anyone wanted to kill Reles, ample opportunity presented itself during 10 to 12 daylong outings to Heckscher Park in Nassau County, where police-escorted witnesses - including Reles - picnicked and played baseball.

Mr. McDermott agrees with the grand jury's findings. A co-author of "NYPD: A City and Its Police," Thomas Reppetto, has a different hypothesis. He does not think the policemen in the suite guarding Reles were culprits, but believes someone who may have had a key entered and threw him out the window. The most notorious mob informant of the 1960s, Joseph Valachi, told a Senate subcommittee in 1963 that the rumor in gangland was that the police had thrown Reles out the window, but the Kings County district attorney responded that Valachi's testimony was a "big lie."

The Ferrucci-Good letter links the Reles case with the disappearance of Judge Crater in 1930 by alleging that Charles Burns's cabby brother Frank picked up Crater in his taxi the night he vanished. The author Richard Tofel, whose book about the judge, "Vanishing Point," was published last year, expressed doubts that Crater got into a cab. He said the account of a cab, widely reported in the press, depends on testimony by a Shubert attorney, William Klein, who later reversed himself. Two others writing books on Crater, Alice Amelar and Peter Quinn, split on this issue: the former does not believe Crater entered a cab that night, the latter does.

It is unclear whether either has any connection to Ferrucci-Good's letter, but a search of the 1930 census shows a 34-year-old Frank L. Burns on Railroad Avenue in Islip, Long Island, was proprietor of a taxi business, and a Frank Burns, age 32, at 190 E. 31st Street in Brooklyn, was a chauffeur for the "Electric Co."

Were police involved in Crater's death? Judge Crater's widow's attorney, Emil Ellis, wrote in a statement that he believed the police had placed envelopes with money and a farewell note in Crater's apartment on Fifth Avenue. Three previous searches had come up empty. Mr. Tofel speculated, however, that Crater's wife, Stella, had initially found the envelopes, removed them, and later placed them there, subsequently purporting to discover them.

Other intriguing information shows the New York Times reported that a police lieutenant named Charles H. Burns was arrested in November 1932 at Newark in connection with a voting fraud incident. But with the number of Burnses swirling around, where's the famed private eye William J. Burns (1861-1932) when you need him?